Hurdle Racing For Beginners

Life isn’t a miracle; it is the starting line to a hurdle race.  You look in front of you and if you are fortunate you are prepared for it.  You have loving parents, just enough means to get by comfortably, and the knowledge to use it wisely.  If you are not one of the lucky ones, however, the hurdles are taller, wider, the race is longer.  The odds are against you.

Yes, birth should be a gift.  God created life to be a blessing, perfect in every way, but we know how that turned out and we know that somewhere along the way the miracle, the blessing, the gift turned sour.  And that’s when it became something resembling a grueling race where some have practiced and some are totally and completely unprepared.

The one beauty in life, the true gift given to us, passed on to us even after we rejected that first and most perfect offering, is opportunity.  We have chances, do overs.  We get to try again and again.  As we fail for the tenth time.  As we lift ourselves up literally and metaphorically, or as we stay on our knees and ask for help from above, the only help that means anything, that can lift us out of anything.  When we are at the bottom of our mistakes is when we are ready for God’s mercy.

This race is a long one and all of us have different advantages and disadvantages, but the one commonality, the thing we can count on, the one we can call on, is God.  And though I can claim to have begun the race blessed with love and family and nurture, the hurdles are still there and so I will claim the promise and fall to my knees every chance I get.  Because we have all been given that opportunity and in a race we all need that extra push to get us to the finish line.